1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a learning apparatus, a learning method, an information processing apparatus, a data selection method, a data accumulation method, a data conversion method and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a variety of contents such as music, video, books and news articles have been provided to users via a network such as the internet with progress of information technology. Since enormous amounts of contents are managed in such content providing services, users have difficulties in finding by oneself an appropriate content which suits each user. Accordingly, a technology called recommendation has been utilized to acquire user's preference based on a user's action history such as purchasing or viewing, for example, and to select and propose contents suitable for individual users.
Utilizing user preference data (UP) which indicates user's preference by numerals or the like according to the user's action history in order to perform recommendation is one of the common points in many of the existing recommendation technologies. For example, in recommendation algorithm called collaborative filtering, the user preference data are compared among different users so as to specify a user having similar preference, and then, a content used by the user in the past is to be the subject for recommendation. Examples of this recommendation algorithm are disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2006-215867 and 2008-077386. Meanwhile, for example, in the recommendation algorithm called content-based filtering, user preference data and content property data indicating content properties in a common data space are compared, and then, contents which are determined to be suitable for the user's preference may become the subject for recommendation.